“The experience of reading without reference to word order, once students “get it,” can be exhilarating, like being freed from a kind of gravity.”

A great description of a “threshold moment” in learning. I think these always happen in learning a new language, if you follow it far enough. Maybe if all students learned a language, they would become more open to threshold moments in their other fields?

“Chinese applicants to the University of San Francisco need not submit a transcript or an SAT score under a newly announced pilot program. Rather, the private Jesuit institution plans to admit students based on their scores on the grueling, multiday Chinese university entrance exam, the gaokao, and their performance in an in-person interview in Beijing.”

As U.S. campuses have dramatically increased their international student populations in recent years, more and more faculty members are encountering a different demographic of student than they are used to – or at least they’re encountering that demographic more frequently. They’re seeing more non-native speakers of English who in many cases are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with American classroom norms: participating in classroom discussions, asking the professor a question, engaging in group work. Plagiarism can be a problem, in part due to different citation practices in different countries.

New data from the Institute of International Education show that the number of international students at U.S. campuses has increased by 72 percent since 2000, fueled in large part by a fivefold increase in the number of students from the dominant sending country, China. A total of 231 U.S. universities now host 1,000 or more international students, compared to 135 in 2000.